


divorced from the weather

by AstronautSquid



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Bittersweet, Character Study, F/M, Fluff and Angst, M/M, in which i abuse metaphors to the nth degree, mild Silverflint if you squint a bit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 08:24:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13454289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstronautSquid/pseuds/AstronautSquid
Summary: There were seasons divorced from the colour of the leaves, the length of the day, or the harvests sleepily ripening in the fields.Summer lasted six months.Autumn was stolen.





	divorced from the weather

**Author's Note:**

> If you want mood music, I recommend "Now and again" by Eliza Rickman.

There were seasons divorced from the colour of the leaves, the length of the day, or the harvests sleepily ripening in the fields.

James had always held to the common belief that spring was youth. The coarse grass and sheer rock and sudden, pale sands leading to the storm-tossed waters of the Padstow coast. Learning to swim, learning to read the sea, learning how to mend fishing nets and clothes. His grandfather's gnarled, clever hands.

“Can't live off it if you don't show it respect,” old Edward Hammett would say unfailingly whenever a storm kept him off the choppy sea. “Have to know what signs to look out for, when the weather's going to turn.”

“But you're not catching anything today.”

“Mending my nets, aren't I? Then less fish will slip away tomorrow. And what good's a haul to me if the waves bash me dead against a cliff today before I can bring it to shore?”

James' brows drew together and he returned to worrying at the scabs on his forearms, the result of an unfortunate tumble down a rocky slope.

James added to spring his early years in the Navy, growing stronger and more cunning under the tutelage of Admiral Hennessy. He learnt trigonometry and how to use the astrolabe, the backstaff and the quadrant to tell his position at sea; how to command men and to take a life, then many lives.

To extend spring beyond his twentieth year seemed awkward. He was growing harder and climbing the ranks with more alacrity than ever before, growth was his daily mandate—but still things stayed ever the same and the flush of youth had long passed.

It was only when Thomas Hamilton entered his life that James realised belatedly he had not nearly been done unfurling.

“You look at him as if he's sunshine made flesh.”

James felt his cheeks heat with blood that had nothing to do with their previous vigorous activity.

“If I gave you the impression of distraction, I never meant—“

“Oh, don't be silly.” Miranda squeezed his earlobe. “One can't help it, if one has the sort of mind receptive to brilliance. Who'd fault a flower for turning to the sun?”

“I'm not sure I feel very much like a flower.”

She snorted. “A stalk of wheat, then. Upright and proud and—”

“Destined to be ground into flour?”

“Raw potential. Full to burst with seed.”

And as was often the case James wasn't sure which of the ambiguous meanings he was intended to take, so he took refuge in bold action and rolled Miranda underneath him.

“And what about you? What sort of dainty plant are you? A rose, lovely but sharp? A blade of grass, which cares not for who tries to trample it, and rises emerald again and again?”

Her laugh was full-throated and low.

“Deeper,” she said, and it was answer and instruction.

Miranda's steady presence stretched beneath him like fertile soil, encouraging him to take root in new places. She fed what seeds had been there and brought forth green shoots longing to burst open. She was greedy and giving as the dark earth itself.

The shoots burst into heavy, obscene, wondrous bloom when Thomas kissed him, and James knew that summer had finally come.

James burnt under the relentless heat of Thomas' bright mind, his wonderfully free heart, and the reddened skin peeled away to leave James raw and new and clean. The juices of forbidden fruit burst on his tongue and ran down his chin. Occasionally Miranda would warn them of the world's dangers, would drag them into reality as into an icy mountain brook, but the reminder of cold only made emerging into the warmth of sun and twosome solitude all the more cherished.

“I need to see it, James.”

“Nassau?”

“The beaches. The waters, the sky, the people. We are planning, we are preparing a future, but what do I know of the people that live there, of where the streams spring from? Of how to tell from the sunset whether the next day's weather will be mild?”

“You can barely predict tomorrow's weather here in London.”

Thomas' brows drew down in a pout and he nipped at James' jaw, drawing both a gasp and a laugh.

“I can predict with great certainty that it will be warm in the morning if you stay the night for a change,” he said against the pulse thrumming in James' throat. James blew out a breath at the gentle suction that followed. “I feel like there might even be the occasional shower.”

“In bed?”

“Mh, showered with kisses, wouldn't that be a nice way to wake? Entire flurries of them.” James tapped a knuckle against Thomas' temple and Thomas shifted until he was draped over James' chest, and pushed his nose into James' cheek. James felt the give of skin and flesh and cartilage. “I predict that the morning would be very warm, and quite likely wet as well.”

“Indeed?” James could feel his face burning but Thomas was so close he couldn't see, though he must surely be able to feel the blood under James' skin.

“Very much so.”

For a moment the room was quiet but for the soft wet sounds of their kissing, ambling towards what might or might not be separation. The clouds outside shifted and threw Thomas' hair into bright relief.

“Alright,” James said. “I'll stay. I need to make sure what these ambitious predictions of yours are worth.”

Thomas' smile outshone the sunset, and he set about realising his forecast dutifully come morning.

They were drunk on the heat and the lazy buzzing of love and lust and ambition.

Summer lasted six months.

Autumn was stolen.

What should have been a long, gradual decline towards the end, spent gathering and preparing for winter, was ripped from James' hands before he ever got used to the summer.

Thrust into an unforgiving winter with no time to gather food stores, James and Miranda took sustenance where they could hunt it down. When huddling together no longer sufficed they tore into each other, ripping open their chests to get at the hot blood within, and fell asleep exhausted and hungry still.

Sometimes James wanted to howl with the irony of it. They had become what society thought they were: a ravenous beast and a bitch.

To stave off the cold, James burnt and burnt and burnt.

Ships and towns and himself.

More than once he burnt hot enough Miranda's hands came away raw with blisters, and it was those nights that James couldn't stay for fear he'd burn the entire house to cinders.

“I heard someone, I thought—“

“It's fine, Miranda. I just couldn't sleep. Tea?”

She sat and she sipped and she hissed because the tea was fresh from the kettle. He watched her throat work around the burn. Miranda stared for a long time ahead at the reflection in the dark windows—her eyes kept slipping and slipping around their faces, never lingering for longer than it took to traverse their image.

“Sometimes I can't sleep,” she said. “Knowing that there's nothing we could have done to save Thomas.”

The liquid sloshed over James' fingers too quickly to register the pain immediately. He didn't notice until the cup had already shattered the window pane, leaving jagged glass teeth to frame the darkness beyond. He wasn't sure if it was Miranda's or his face he had been aiming for. Both. Neither. The space between.

Miranda made no sound as she shot upright, trembling with a thing that was not fear.

“Is that what you tell yourself?” James rose as well, putting distance between them, never looking away. His fingers dripped hot like blood. The stains would dry invisible on the dark floors. As if he'd never been there at all, once he left the house. “That there was nothing to be done, that the safe way was the only way? Is _that_ why you lie awake, because you didn't have a choice and now have no blame to assign to yourself? Do you envy me, lying awake every night knowing there might have been some way to save him, had I stayed?”

 _Had I not listened to you?,_ he didn't say.

James thought Miranda might slap him. He half waited for it. But after another moment of breathing heavily, of her shoulders rising until her collarbones inclined steep as the slopes of impenetrable valleys, she merely thrust a finger to the door. Her arm trembled, not from feebleness, but from what she was holding back.

“Out.”

He repaired the window the next day when he knew she was further inland to visit one of the farmers' wives. He did not return to their house for two months and when he did, the volumes stuffed in his pockets weighed all the heavier for all the ink he had spent trying to find the right words.

Finally, in Charlestown, Miranda leapt onto the pyre of his rage, to consume and destroy with him, and was burnt like kindling. She blazed bright and hot as a spray of blood to the face, as a jet of flame, and was snuffed out and was gone.

It wasn't fair, could never be fair, and for the first time James found himself nothing but ash.

The fury that followed was the darkest depth of winter, sharp and cold as ice.

Just when James had accepted the thought of finally cutting himself open on the ice shards, John Silver emerged from the storm clouds that had brought him, and struck with the heat and suddenness of a lightning bolt. Unbidden and—at first—unwelcome. Melted the ice right from James' hands. A sudden flash of light that burned James' eyes and his hands and set him ablaze once more.

“Where do you see yourself in all this?”

Silver looked up from a set of maps with a frown.

“Myself?”

“Once we've taken back Nassau. Once the revolution grants us an 'after.' What's going to become of Long John Silver, the pirate king? What's going to become of John Silver, the man?”

“Assuming victory—that's awfully optimistic of you, if I may say so.”

“And you're trying awfully hard to avoid the question.”

Silver huffed and reached for James' cup to take a long swig. When he set it down again he splashed the margin of the closest map with watered rum.

“I've always liked to take what opportunities present themselves and avoid planning too far ahead,” he said. “Not for much further than is necessary. The occasional scheme to steal a cache of gold aside,” he conceded with a tilt to his mouth. “I plan as far as is necessary for my continued survival and, if attainable, comfort.”

“And those aren't included in a successful revolution?”

Silver looked at James shrewdly, as if there were something written on his face that Silver couldn't quite decypher and couldn't quite ignore either. That he wouldn't ask about.

“I'm sure I'm not being presumptuous in assuming that _you_ have given my place careful consideration.”

“Of course I have.”

And Silver, leaving James surprised and silent, had turned back to the maps without inquiring after what, precisely, James had thought up of his future.

Silver melted the cold from his bones, unrelenting as a forest fire burning away old brush.

Madi swept over him like a breeze carrying the promise of heat, patient and entirely indifferent to his own machinations, determined to see things done according to her will. Like spring, she was accustomed to ruling, and wore the promise of triumph well.

“Is this how your kind demonstrates power? By darning your own socks?”

James hummed and tied off the thread, then turned the sock inside out to inspect his handiwork. When he didn't offer more, Madi sat beside him, brushing her skirts forward.

“John told me how you met. How he helped you win the crew's favour again.”

“That happened after he first stole something from me.”

“So I gathered. It seems exhausting, constantly running after your men and trying to sway their fickle, short-sighted minds. You waste a lot of energy that might be better spent ruling.”

A corner of James' mouth twitched skyward. “If the ruler is as well-suited to the office as you are, that seems like the most sensible thinking, yes.”

“And are you? Well-suited?”

“Wouldn't you be the better judge of my qualifications, daughter to a king and queen that you are?”

The look she gave him was playful and appraising and reproachful all at once, and the warmth in her eyes was like a spring shower washing the dust off his face.

For a few blissful months James thought spring had returned, as it inevitably must in the wake of winter.

Against his will, James allowed himself to thaw, and to let what had been and what was melt into the same river, flooding inexorably towards the sea. How could he have known that Silver, of all people, would try to separate the waters again, to sift out the floods of Flint from those of McGraw?

The green young shoots of Madi's revolution died in their earthen womb when Silver's forest fire, bright and all-consuming but doomed to fade, flickered to ash.

And James was led by a length of chain into autumn.

And he finally learnt what it meant to harvest.

Thomas' embrace wasn't spring. Their kisses were neither new nor renewal. They were the fruit of seed sown long ago, watered with tears and blood until they ripened at last. They weren't beginning, but completion of a work begun ten years ago.

And James gathered.

As the grey began to marble their heads, as joints began to ache in the mornings, James knew that the next winter wouldn't pass him over. At the end of autumn, Thomas would have to leave him, or he Thomas, led afar by time's uncaring hand. James dreaded the thought but he faced it with greater composure now. He wouldn't be caught to starve anymore.

And he gathered.

Like a bountiful harvest James plucked moments and moments from their days. He took the deepening crow's feet and laugh lines, he took the comfort of Thomas' slumberous weight on chilly nights. He took their mingled seed and the blue skies, the summer heat and muggy winters, and that one winter when it snowed. He took rare sweets pressed into Thomas' smiling mouth and every drop of sweat that dried on their sated skins. He took the pollen Thomas would shake from his hair after a springtide walk and the crackle of autumn leaves under their heavy, playful bodies. He took the silences shared deep in the night over bottles of expensively-purchased liquor, Miranda's favourites—sherry and wine and cherry liquor.

 _You were almost right,_ he thought to her. Sometimes the sweet burden of possibility was almost too heavy to bear, so full was he with it. Not the possibility to return to his life as it had been, not tto choose whatever life he wanted, nor to make those pay that were responsible. Those were forever forsaken to him.

James wasn't overwhelmed by how many choices there were.

He was consumed by the sheer magnitude of the single most impossible possibility of all: to make a life with Thomas, to turn winter into autumn and know himself twice blessed.

“Why'd you stop reading?” Thomas lifted his drowsy head from James' thigh. The air cooled the damp patch where he had absentmindedly chewed on a fold in the fabric of James' breeches, half-asleep.

James took that tiny, tender chill as well, and tucked it between sun-drunk mornings and their shared daily bread.

“Nothing,” he said and rubbed a thumb along the side of Thomas' nose. Thomas' eyes squeezed shut as James continued upward and along his brow, and slid tender fingers into his hair. “Do you want to go to bed?”

“Once we're done here,” Thomas mumbled and sighed heavily. James felt the rise and fall of his ribcage against James' legs.

“Oh?”

Thomas pushed himself up on his arms and shifted his weight from James' legs to his chest. James felt lovingly suffocated.

“After this we're done,” Thomas said and kissed him sweetly.

And James had so many kisses stored up, he was full to burst with them, but he took this one too.

With full hands James gathered, and feared winter no more.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was an odd one to work on. I'm still not sure how happy I am with the outcome, but I think it's as complete as it's going to be, and I can take it off my lengthy WIP list.
> 
> Drop a comment if you liked it! And feel free to hit me up on [tumblr](http://squid-inspiration.tumblr.com/) <3


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